We went to the Chelam diner and sat in a booth and had eggs and sausage and pumpkin pancakes and home-fried potatoes, but it wasn't much of a celebration. There was a curious letdown feeling between us, as if there were unresolved business still at hand. When Toby was finished, he got up and played a video game. s.p.a.ce Command s.p.a.ce Command. A guy with a ray gun trying to kill thousands of little bugs. Karen watched him uneasily.

I said, "At loose ends?"

She nodded. "Does it show?"

I said, "There's a lot to think about. There's still Peter in your life."

She nodded again. "It's that, but it's more than that, too. It's as if a very large object has moved across the sky, but only we've seen it. These other people here in the diner, Joyce Steuben at the bank, no one else in town has seen it."

I nodded. It's always like that.

She said, "I don't know what I'm going to do. I thought I did, but now I don't." She turned away from her son and looked at me. "I fought so hard to keep what I have here in Chelam and at the bank. Now that I've got it, you know what keeps coming to mind? Maybe I can get a better job closer to the city or up in Boston. Maybe I can find a better high school for Toby. Isn't that crazy?"

I made the same little shrug for Karen Lloyd that I had made for Peter Alan Nelsen. "Not crazy. It wasn't a choice you could make before. Now you're free to make any choice you want."

She sort of smiled at that and looked back at her son. "Yes, I guess I am." Then the smile became a little laugh that was light and open. It was the first time that I had heard her laugh.

After a while Joe and I went to the Taurus and Karen and Toby went to her LeBaron and the four of us drove back to her house beneath gray skies expectant with snow. We went inside and packed our things while Karen made phone calls and Toby dug around in the kitchen for something to eat. Twelve years old, and you're always hungry. When my bags were packed, I called United and booked two returns on a flight they had leaving from Kennedy at six-forty that night. When I told Pike the time, he said, "Didn't they have anything sooner?"

At twenty-four minutes after noon the black limo turned into the drive and Peter Alan Nelsen came to the door. Karen let him in. She said, "I thought you had gone back to Los Angeles."

Peter said, "I want to start over. I know that me coming here is going to create problems for you, and changes, and I want to do what I can to help you through them. I don't want you and the boy to think I'm an a.s.shole. I want Toby to get to know me, and I want to get to know him, and I want to work out things like visitation and holidays and getting together. I want to pay child support, but only if that's okay with you. Can we talk about this stuff?"

Karen Lloyd said, "Oh, s.h.i.t."

Peter said, "Please."

Karen Lloyd made a little whistle and tapped her right hand on her thigh and looked at the television. The television was not turned on.

I said, "Sounds pretty good to me."

Karen shook her head and frowned.

Peter said, "C'mon, Karen. Please Please."

I said, "For Christ's sake, meet him halfway."

Karen crossed her arms and the frown grew deeper. "We'll see." Give'm an inch.

The phone rang and Karen Lloyd went into the kitchen and answered it. When she was gone, Peter said, "What do you think?"

I spread my hands. "We'll see."

Karen came back and said, "It's a man named Roland George."

I left them to stare at each other and went into the kitchen. Rollie came on with a tight, clipped voice. "You heard?"

"What?"

"On the news ten minutes ago. Sal DeLuca was shot to death in his health club, four in the head, close range, sometime around ten this morning. You know anything about it?"

"I think it was Charlie. If it was, I think he'll want us next."

I hung up and went back into the living room and told Karen and Peter and Joe Pike. When I told them, Peter said, "You mean the sonofab.i.t.c.h is coming back here?"

"Yes."

Karen said, "I knew it couldn't be this easy. I knew it wasn't over. What are we going to do?"

"Get into town where there's people. When you and Toby are safe, Joe and I will see what we can do with Charlie."

Karen called Toby and we went quickly out the front door and into her LeBaron. I told Peter to get in the back and I told Karen that I would drive. Neither of them objected.

Toby said, "Is it those men again, Mom?"

We pulled away from her house and went down the clean new tarmac street and turned onto the main road toward Chelam. It was twenty-eight minutes after noon.

We had gone about two miles when they found us.

Thirty-seven.

They came up behind us in two cars, a green Dodge station wagon and the black Town Car, just as the snow began to fall.

Pike saw them first. "Behind us. Turned out from a side road, maybe a half mile back."

I pushed Toby's head down. "Get on the floor. Make yourself as small as you can and wrap your arms around your head."

I pushed Karen down on top of him.

The Town Car pulled into the left lane and the wagon stayed in the right and they came on hard. Pike reached under his jacket and took out his .357.

I pressed the LeBaron's pedal to the floor, but the Town Car inched closer and then there were gold specks flashing around it and something hit the rear of the LeBaron two times, bam bam bam bam, like rocks thrown by a kid hiding behind a tree. The right rear tire blew and Karen Lloyd made a sharp gasping sound and Toby said, "What was that?"

The LeBaron nosed up and I swung us to the right, and then we were off the road and bouncing across an untended pumpkin field, ripping through weeds and a barbed-wire fence and a couple of white birch saplings. I gunned the engine and forced the LeBaron across the field, sideways half the time and near out of control, until the flat right rear dug into the loam maybe three hundred yards from the road and the LeBaron wouldn't go any farther. I said, "Everybody out."

The station wagon and the Town Car skidded to a stop on the road and doors banged open and eight men pushed out, five of them with shotguns. Charlie DeLuca had been driving the Town Car and Joey Putata was one of the guys in the wagon, but I didn't recognize anyone else. Ric was conspicuous by his absence. No one now to keep Charlie calm, no one to rub his back and say the quiet things and keep Charlie DeLuca among the land of the sane. Sal the Rock had learned that. Charlie was certifiably, stark-raving, bad-to-the-bone out of control.

I shoved the driver's side door open and fell out, then pushed my seat forward and pulled Karen and Toby out after me. Pike went out the pa.s.senger's side and the .357 boomed twice. Peter followed Pike, and then the five of us were crouched down among the pumpkins behind the LeBaron.

Two of the guys up on the road started blasting away with their shotguns, but then someone did a lot of arm waving and they stopped. Three hundred yards with shotguns was silly.

The little pumpkin field was maybe five hundred yards on a side, bordered to the east and the west and the south by thick stands of birch and elm and maple trees. Behind us to the south there was a little ramshackle feed shed that looked to be maybe a hundred years old. I squatted down next to Karen and said, "Does anyone live around here?"

"Maybe a couple of miles that way." She pointed southwest.

"Is there a road behind us?"

She scrunched her face, trying to think but not having an easy time of it. "There must be. Some kind of farming road."

Toby said, "Yeah, there is. It's a utility road. Dirt."

"How far?"

"Maybe a mile and a half. It's on the other side of all these fields. It comes out by this little airport where the crop dusters fly, but there won't be anyone there. They close it down in the winter."

Pike said, "If we can get there, maybe we can make a farmhouse."

The snow fell harder, swirling and piling up in little white pockets on the LeBaron and on the pumpkins, thick enough in the air to make the men on the road indistinct and shadowy. Two of the shadows went off to the left and two of them went right and four of them started off the road directly for us. Cla.s.sic pincer move. Probably taught that at the mafia academy.

I said, "They're going to try to envelop us, faster guys moving out on the flank, the other guys coming slow up the middle to drive us toward them."

Pike said, "Unh-hunh," and opened the duffel. He took out the shotgun and a cartridge box and began filling his pockets with the sh.e.l.ls. Twenty-five rounds in the box, but he found places for all of them.

Peter was squatting next to Karen and behind Toby. He had put an arm around Karen's shoulders without thinking about it. Or maybe he had. He said, "Maybe we could dig in here and hold them off."

Pike shook his head. "Not with twenty-five rounds."

I duck-walked to Karen and Peter and knelt close to them. Their faces were white and their eyes were squinty and drawn. "We're going to have to split up. Pike and I will go out to the flanks. You guys move straight back across the field and try to get to the farm road. Do you understand that?"

They both said, "Yes."

"Stay low and run as fast as you can just like you've seen people do on television. Try to keep the car between you and the four guys coming across the field. They're coming slow because they know we have guns, so you'll have time. Work your way to the feed shed and get behind it, and then work your way to the woods using the shed as cover."

Peter nodded and Karen said, "Yes."

"Don't stop until you get to people. Then call the police."

Karen wasn't looking into my eyes. She was watching my mouth, getting every word. Hanging on by her fingernails.

Peter said, "I don't want to run off. I want to do something."

"You are doing something. You're helping this woman and your son get to a safe place. That's your job."

Peter glanced down at the woman that he used to be married to and their son, and he nodded. "Sure. Okay."

I turned to Toby. "Tobe, you think you can find the road through the woods?"

"Sure. You just keep going south."

"Okay. You get to the road, which way to the airfield?"

"East."

I looked back at Karen and then at Peter. "Do it."

Karen said, "They're going to kill us, aren't they?"

"They're going to try. But Joe and I won't let them."

Her eyes were big and darting. She held tight to Toby's arm. "How can you stop them? There're eight of them and we're trapped here in the middle of nowhere with them."

Pike chambered a round into his shotgun. "No," he said. "They're trapped with us."

I gave Karen a little nod and then she crabbed away, holding on to Toby's shirt with her right hand, crouched low and stumbling through the frozen weeds and the pumpkins. Peter followed close after them.

Pike said, "How many rounds you got?"

"Just what's in the gun."

He gave me disapproval.

"I know," I said. "You can't take me anywhere."

He handed me the .357, b.u.t.t first, then gave me a little leather pouch with three speed-loaders. Be prepared.

"You ready?"

"I'm ready."

"Let's do it."

We fired six quick rounds at the four men coming across the field, then Joe broke left and I broke right, moving low and fast, and then he was behind me and gone.

The snow was a glistening powder across the field, piling up in little mounds that scattered without sound as I moved. Charlie DeLuca saw us break, and the three guys with him opened up, firing with the shotguns and their pistols, still better than two hundred yards out. Panic shots. I guess they hadn't expected us to try to outflank the flankers. Charlie yelled something at the guys who had gone into the woods, but with the snow and the wind and the distance you couldn't make out what he was saying. Pellets rained on the field around me and a great orange pumpkin exploded, but I didn't stop and I didn't look back. I stayed low and moved hard and wondered if the guys in the woods were making better time coming my way than I was making going theirs. Then I didn't think about it anymore and pretty soon I was in the trees.

I moved twenty yards into the tree line and stopped between two white birch to listen. If the flankers had moved fast, maybe they were already behind me. They weren't. Thirty yards upwind toward the road, limbs snapped and dead leaves crunched and it sounded like the Fifth Marines were on the march. City kids come out to play. This deep in the trees, you couldn't see the field. They didn't know Karen and Peter and Toby were falling back and they didn't know Pike and I had moved into the tree line. Out in the field, the pistols and the shotguns had stopped firing and Charlie was yelling, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. If I couldn't hear, the flankers couldn't hear. They were making so much noise that even if Charlie had been understandable, they wouldn't have heard.

I moved deeper into the trees and found a place beside a fallen elm and waited. In the woods the snow fell only slightiy, caught higher in the tree canopy by dead leaves and vines and branches. Some of the earlier snow had melted and the water had leached down the trees, making their bark feel velvety and damp and enhancing their good smell. Except for the coming of the flankers, it was quiet. Calm. The natural state of the woods.

Joey Putata and a guy in a blaze-orange hunting jacket pushed their way through a tangle of vines hanging from a dogwood tree. The guy in the orange jacket had heavy sideburns and the kind of coa.r.s.e virulent beard that had to be shaved three times a day and a little hat with a feather in the band. Joey Putata was carrying a 12-gauge Mossberg slug gun and the guy in the orange had a Ruger Redhawk .44 Magnum revolver. Joey's eyes were still black and green from the beating Charlie had given him, but here he was, tramping through the woods. Some guys are stupid all the way through. The guy in orange ducked down under a branch but didn't duck far enough. The branch knocked his hat off and a slug of fresh snow fell down his back. He said, "Sonofab.i.t.c.h," and then they stopped.

Joey Putata said, "You think we're far enough?"

The guy with the hat said, "How the f.u.c.k I know? Let's go that way and see if we can find Tony and Mike." Tony and Mike must be the other flankers.

From a very long way off there were two quick booms booms. Joey got excited and said, "Maybe we got'm." When he said it, he shoved the guy with the hat, and the guy with the hat turned sideways and saw me. I shot him once in the chest. The .357 slug hit him square in the sternum like an express-speed brick and punched him back into the vines. I said, "Hey, Joey. Don't you ever learn?"

Joey brought up the Mossberg, but he didn't bring it up fast enough. I shot him once in the neck and then I was moving back toward the field.

When I came out of the tree line, Pike was running toward the LeBaron. Charlie and the other three guys were gone and so was the black Town Car.

Pike said, "He took off a couple of minutes ago, heading away from town."